KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 1 ― US army veteran Eugene Bozzi has become a viral star for using a wheelie bin to trap and relocate an alligator.

 

In the video, the 26-year-old was seen approaching an alligator with a wheelie bin as the reptile slowly backs away.

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Bozzi inches closer and keeps pushing on until the alligator ends up in the bin.

The Florida man told the New York Post that it was a spur of the moment thinking that had led him to action.

“The trash container was “big enough to scare him into thinking that’s a mouth.

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“I watched a lot of ‘Animal Planet’ videos, and he’s going to think that I’m like a hippo or something.

“He didn’t put up a big fight. I could’ve been more aggressive, but I don’t like to hurt animals, so I took him down safely and everything worked out.”

In the footage, after securing the alligator inside the wheelie bin, Bozzi wheels the reptile to a  retention pond across the street before releasing it.

Bozzi said he had been talking to his nephew in the garage of his home in Mount Dora, Florida when his daughter alerted about the reptile.

“I went over there, and it was bigger than me.

“There were other people’s kids out there also. Military instinct kicked in ― and, you know, ‘Protect at all costs.”

The trimmed version of the video has been viewed over 13 million times on Twitter with social media users amused by the video, including Bozzi’s socks and slippers with one user labelled it as the ‘official uniform of the Florida man’.

 

Meanwhile, the wild encounter has caught the attention of US’s authority.

The official Twitter account of Orange County, Florida has retweeted the video with caption saying, ‘Reminder, alligators are not recyclable in your blue-lid cart’ while adding a Nuisance Alligator Hotline number in the tweet.